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What is really scary about this whole Times Square bomb incident is that the only reason we’re safe is that Faisal Shahzad didn’t know a hot wire from a jumper cable.

Dumb luck on our part and dumber bomb-maker on their part.

Not only was he able to drive right in and park the car on the street — why can’t I ever find one of those spots? — and, in clear view of everyone, begin assembling a bomb, but he even managed to avoid detection for a day before hopping on a plane for Dubai. Whomever sold him his tickets (he paid in cash no less) didn’t see Shahzad’s name on a no-fly list. Eventually, — thank God, Allah, Buddha or any other existential being –— that someone discovered he was on the planeand, just like in “24,” the Feds were able to nab him right in the nick of time.

Talk about cliffhangers.

Come on, people — let’s wake up — there’s tighter security in Chuck E. Cheese’s. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly was on TV proud as punch that Shahzad was captured within 53 hours of the incident — and I have to agree it was, for us, really quick. It’s been almost 10 years since 9-11 and the feds still can’t find Osama bin Laden.

Emerging reports have stated that Shahzad was under scrutiny as far back as 2004 — six years ago — yet his comings and goings to Pakistan were never questioned? No one had any idea where or what Shahzad was up to? Where is the intelligence? I guess it was hiding in the same files as the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik “AbduWali” Hasan, who was allowed to practice even after military investigators found he had connections to a radical imam.

There’s buzz that they want to change the way airlines check their no-fly lists. Here’s a suggestion, how about every time someone buys a ticket they check the no-fly list, and when someone checks in at the counter,they check the database. Hell, the airlines charge enough and we wait long enough on line, what’s a little bit more?

Shahzad was just one — but the list goes on — Omar Abdulmutallab, the BVD Bomber; Ahmad Wais Afzal; Najibullah Zazi; Wesam “Khaled” El-Hanafi; Sabirhan “Tareq” Hasanoff; Syed Hashmi, and these were just in the last year. How many more are being groomed? When the news came on about Times Square, my daughter said, “Mom, you know they are going to keep on trying until they get it right.”

Not for nuthin’e_STmk, but she’s right, and it’s time Washington wakes up and smells the Starbucks. We need to keep our collective butts as snug as a bug in a rug instead of flies stuck in a web on the face of a bull’s-eye.